NEWBERRY, Ind. (July 24, 2019) — The Battery Innovation Center (BIC) is announcing that it will hold its 4th annual BIC Industry Stakeholder Luncheon on October 24, 2019 at the Crane Bay Event Center in downtown Indianapolis. A morning networking session will take place prior to the luncheon, featuring company booths, product demonstrations, and university poster sessions.

This year’s event will focus on “Women in STEM” and will feature keynote speakers Leila Madrone, founder and CTO of Sunfolding, and Fran Lockwood, CTO of Valvoline. Both women are well known within the energy sector, and will speak on the latest battery technology their companies are involved in. The luncheon agenda will also include a panel discussion on the topic of technology commercialization. A full list of panel participants will be announced at a later date.

In addition to the speakers, the BIC will present two of their “Charged for Innovation” awards. Candidates are chosen by BIC stakeholders and the award recognizes one scale-up and one start-up for their innovative, forward-thinking ideas and work in the energy storage space. The 2018 “Charged for Innovation” scale-up award went to Underwriter’s Laboratory, a global safety certification lab, and the start-up award went to Lightning Motorcycles, an all-electric motorsport company.

The goal for the annual luncheon is to bring together all the movers and shakers in the battery technology industry to promote innovation, networking, talent recruitment, and education. The presentations give the audience insight on the most recent innovations in the energy storage space, unique competitive systems, validation and safety protocols, and real-world applications. Last year’s event drew almost 200 attendees and representation from over 75 companies.

The Battery Innovation Center is a public-private partnership and not-for-profit organization that partners with leadership from commercial enterprises, world-class universities, and government organizations to focus on rapid development, testing and commercialization, and training of safe, reliable and lightweight energy storage systems for commercial and defense organizations. Incubated and launched by Energy Systems Network (ESN) – a nonprofit based in Indianapolis focused on growing the advanced energy technology and mobility sectors – the Battery Innovation Center provides both a virtual collaborative network of capabilities needed for development of next generation energy storage solutions as well as a state-of-the-art $15.6 million, 40,000 sq. ft advanced energy research lab. The BIC is also home to Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Battery Energy Storage Test lab (BEST). For more information, please visit www.bicindiana.com.